campaign settings yes or no

[mr.fizzypop]

I've been playing DnD for a while now and have never tried any of the pre-made campaigns(ebberon, forgotton realms, ect.) and was wondering is it worth it? I usually make my own worlds, but that usually takes a while, and the PCs end up asking "where are we?" "whats this town?" "what are we doing". Going through my world knowing nothing, and not caring to know anything. Im thinking if I use a campaign book, the world is spelled out before me, and if they need any info, they can just look through the book. But that might lead to them finding a loophole in any adventure Im running. Any advise?

[Comet]

Pre-made settings are very nice to have, as they save you from a lot of extra work. Tho you are right about the thing with the players knowing perhaps even too much. It can get quite irritating when someone goes in the middle of the session: "No, I think [city] has a queen, not a king. You, sir, are a lousy GM".
Hasn't happened to me yet, mind, but I have heard some pretty horrifying stories.

The solution? Talk with the players, ask them not to be asses about their knowledge. Sure, they can correct you if you are, for example, misremembering something important or whatever. Roleplaying is a group effort, after all.

But at the end of the day, the DM is still the one who decides what the world is going to be like. So if one of your players is going wild with his OOC info, change something. Make it clear that you have changed some things in the world but that it is still Forgotten Realms or whatever you are playing, with some differences. The DM has the right to alter the world to his liking. Don't change too much but don't be afraid to alter things either.

Your world, your rules. The books are just guidelines, at least for me.

[RagnaroksChosen]

I love Forgotten Realms...


But i have had players be like I don't remember so and so there.... so usually i just say before a campaign start that we are basing this loosely off Forgotten realms so no one gets pissed if i take some creative licensee. Eberron can be good to if your into high action fast pace games.

[GrassyGnoll]

Dark Sun. For the love of Road Warrior, Dark Sun. It's a psionics heavy desert world ruled by evil dragon wizard-kings.

Hell, it's even free after all these years.

[Comet]

Agreed on Dark Sun, it is awesome.

Also, thank you kindly for the link LordOfTheDucks!

[Venerable]

It really depends on the group. If they're hack'n'slash, you might not need a full-blown campaign setting. But if they're in it for the story and you don't have time to flesh out your own setting, a pre-built one can be just what you need.

I'll agree with Conjob that it's important for players to understand that even though they're in a published campaign setting, the world may deviate from what's in the books. The DM's word is the final one in this case.

[This said from someone who hadn't played in twenty years, was invited into a 3.5 Eberron campaign and loved it. Eberron has history and fluff out the wazoo! Then the DM switched to 4e and started a basic dungeon crawl in a generic setting. It's filling but tastes like cardboard. (Not his fault, as he doesn't have time to build a world of his own.)]

[GrassyGnoll]

Agreed on Dark Sun, it is awesome.

Also, thank you kindly for the link LordOfTheDucks!

No problem, wish the MM had some pics though. They even did a bit of adapting the setting to 4E. Shame it's not coming back anytime soon.

[Hal]

I really prefer to build my own worlds. It means that nothing exists beyond what I've come up with. If the players want to know something about the world, I'm the arbiter of what they can or can't know.

I've found that it eases the work to 1) put them in a sandbox and 2) try to work from minimal notes. I realize the second isn't for everybody, but loose notes mean you don't spend time mapping out something that the players never even see.

By "sandbox," by the way, I mean just an area where you can isolate them. A kingdom surrounded by mountains on all sides, an island with a limited number of ports, an underground city . . . you can ease your work further by just limiting their movement to a few areas you can flesh out well.

[Lord Tataraus]

As others have said, official campaign settings are a double-edged sword. For one, it is more likely for the DM and players to be on the same page as far as knowing the world is concerned which means you can make some assumptions, but it also means you are limited to the components of the setting.

Personally, I love world building, it is my favorite part of DMing and RPGs in general. I never use official settings other than to steal ideas from, I make tons of different settings for different campaigns and I'm always sure to give out a decent summary of the setting, however this means that the players don't have as much depth in the setting except through what they learn in game.

The best advice I can give you is to look at your group and see if you think it will work out. I would never be able to run a game in any official setting because I just couldn't get my players to read that much into it, they don't expect to play in the same world twice. For other groups, they like the familiarity and it lets them do a lot with the setting and have a constantly expanding series of campaigns slightly influenced by each other.

[AstralFire]

I've never seen a disadvantage in using a published campaign setting other than the fact that you may not like everything in the setting.

My group is aware of the fact that as the DM, I am the final arbiter of what the world as a whole looks like. We use the sourcebooks as easy reference and ideas, but if I make something that conflicts with them, I don't really get questioned about it. If it's major to the world, someone might bring it up, and then I'll decide my response. But no one's ever complained if I decided that the flub was too big to retcon so I just decided it was the new reality, and I've used it as the source of starting an adventure to find 'the real truth' before. I just make sure I don't conflict with anything they planned in their backstory.

However, I do have an advantage in that when I used a preplanned setting, it tends to be Planescape or Eberron, both of which are a lot more fast-and-loose with the details - Planescape by virtue of the fact that the cosmology's got shifted a lot and there's simply too much to detail overall, Eberron by design.

[valadil]

I've only done world building once. Didn't like it. The problem was that even when I had good ideas, the players didn't have them as background. Putting my ideas on paper was hard enough, but getting the players to read the paper was damn near impossible.

There are places where I think world building is appropriate. Displaced campaigns where the party is transported to an unfamiliar land are the best example. In these games it makes sense that players don't know the world and discovery is a huge part of the game.

The other place I like seeing world building is over a long series of campaigns. Okay, so the players don't know the history the first time they're in the world, but by the third and fourth campaigns they've built up enough of the world history and they're very familiar with the going ons of the world that they're effectively playing in an established campaign.

[de-trick]

i ussally go with a pre-made world, but adding in my own towns and such where i want to, so its more of a losely pre-made world, with a little bit of a homebrew world in it